Often business or club owners will want to place advertisements or special messages on their site.
Sometimes these ads will take the form of simple text messages while other times they will involve graphical content.
Third party organizations may offer banner exchange programs, and provide some form of business incentive to you (the site owner) when people are directed to a particular site via “clicks” from your site.
For example, they may provide you with a referral fee, or some other form of credit based on the traffic that you generate for them.
An example of the setup screen to configure a simple Text advertisement is shown above.
For each custom advertisement, you can provide some title text, a short message, as well as an optional internet URL to take a visitor to when they click on your ad.
There are other setup preferences that influence the placement and behaviour of the side panel ads as well under “System Setup” / “Preferences” and “Custom Ads”.
If ads are not appearing on your site, it may be that there are no ad definitions present, or Custom Ads may be turned off in the Side Panels settings in the Custom Ads section. The Side Panel setup options related to ads are shown below:
The last option in the setup screen above is a convenience link that makes it easy to navigate back to the screen where custom ads are configured.
After ensuring that custom ads are enabled, you can go ahead and define your ads. The first three ads are “text” style ads while the second three ads are “graphics” style ads. They behave identically except that the graphics ads will reference a graphical side-panel element that you have previously uploaded to the site. (Remember that graphics elements must be in the Photo Library in a Photo Category called “Side Panel Graphics”) For best results, these graphical ads should be 150 pixels wide and ideally 112 pixels in height. Although the system can re-size graphics on upload, you will see crisper images if you create graphics to be the correct size initially.
Graphics ads must already be in your photo library before they will be selectable as in the graphic below.
The process of linking an ad to an action is nearly identical to the process of linking menu items to actions so a full explanation is not repeated here.
The URL field is best entered by using your browsers copy and paste function. Simply open a separate browser window and navigate to the screen that you want to link to when someone clicks on the text or graphical ad.
Then copy and paste this URL (uniform resources locator) from your browser window into the NeatClubs.COM Ad setup screen above.
The target URL may refer to local pages on your site or pages on other sites. Links should always start with the prefix http:// or https://.
In some instances, when you select a Session schedule to generate, NeatClubs.COM may actually store the reference to the session schedule as an automatically constructed URL reference.
Be careful that you don't attempt to link to a page that required that you be logged in before it can be viewed. Otherwise an error will occur when a public visitor attempt to follow the ad to your selected URL.